Moral status, suffering, and compassion: Towards reconciling human moral priority with animal welfare

Abstract This paper critically examines the principle of equal consideration of interests (ECOI) in the discourse of animal ethics. I claim that within a consequentialist moral order, an entity's moral status comes from working backward from consequences, not solely on intrinsic capacities. Hence, I propose that to judge moral status, one must take into account not only (a) an entity's intrinsic capacity for sentience but also (b) how reliably that entity will reduce suffering overall. Given these two criteria, I explore whether human beings deserve a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. While there is evidence that homo sapiens have evolved a unique instinctual urge to reduce suffering called ‘compassion,’ humans are not always compassionate. For this reason, I conclude that as a species, human beings do deserve a much higher moral status than other animals; however, the moral status of any individual human being falls upon a much wider spectrum above and below other animals. This framework has the advantage of justifying common moral intuitions about human moral superiority while still obligating humans to exercise compassion. I conclude by discussing the implications of this on the moral status of non-paradigm humans, and its possible import for AI ethics and alignment.